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Firefox 27: Find out what is new

A new stable version of the Firefox web browser will be released by Mozilla in the coming 24 hour period. Firefox 27 brings Firefox one step closer to the Australis theme which will be launched as part of Firefox 29 if things go as planned (it is moved to the Aurora channel right now).

Adventurous users can download the newest stable version of Firefox from Mozilla's FTP server or a third-party download site as they are usually offered there prior to the official release announcement and availability on Mozilla's website or via Firefox's automatic update feature.

It is usually not recommended to update early, as last minute changes can make another build the final one. Usually though, that does not happen.

You can check for new versions manually with a click on the Firefox button, and the selection of Help > About Firefox.

To establish a secure connection, browser and server need to agree on a protocol that they both support. Up until now, that meant to see if TSL 1.0 is supported, and if it is, it would be used. If not, browser and server would fallback to SSL v3 instead.

With TLS 1.2 support in Firefox stable, TLS 1.2 is now used if supported by the server, and only if it is not supported, TLS 1.1, TLS 1.0 and SSL v3 are checked and the first one that is supported is used to secure the connection.

The two preferences that handle this are:

security.tls.version.min

security.tls.version.max

Min is set to 0 by default, while max to 3. Here is a short list of what the values mean:

0 refers to SSL 3

1 refers to TSL 1.0

2 refers to TLS 1.1

3 refers to TLS 1.2

You can change the minimum requirements (or maximum but that is not suggested) so that TLS is always used. This may mean however that connections to some servers, those that only support SSL 3 but not TLS, cannot be established anymore.

SocialAPI supports multiple providers

Firefox's SocialAPI enables webmasters to offer services that make use of it in the browser. The prime example here is Facebook's Messenger for Firefox which was one of the first to make use of it.

The messenger application added notifications and chat to Firefox in the form of buttons and a sidebar that could easily be displayed and be hidden again when not needed.

Up until now, only one social provider could be active at the same time in the browser. Firefox 27 changes this as you can now receive notifications and other information from multiple social providers.

The feature is only supported by a few providers including Facebook, msnNOW, Cliqz and Mixi.

Social features are not enabled by default, and come only into play once at least one social provider has been added to the browser.

Up until now, you had to switch providers manually whenever you wanted them to provide you with their functionality.

Update: New social partners announced today, including Delicious and Saavn. More information about those here.

Mozilla added support for Google's SPDY networking protocol to Firefox 11. The main goal of the protocol is to reduce web page load latency and improve security at the same time.

Servers that you connect to need to support SPDY for this to work though, with many major sites such as Twitter, Facebook, WordPress.com or the majority of Google properties supporting it in varying degrees.

SPDY 3.1 is only supported by some servers, Google's servers support it for instance, while many others do not support it yet. This will change over time though.

You can find out if a particular service supports SPDY, and if so which versions of the protocol, by loading Spdycheck in your browser.

Developer changes

JavaScript can be "unminified" in the debugger panel using the {} button.

About Martin Brinkmann

Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand.You can follow Martin on Facebook, Twitter or Google+

Responses to Firefox 27: Find out what is new

I just installed Adobe Flash Player - 12.0.0.44 - Firefox -32 bit (Today d.d. 2014-02-04) and the also today out Mozilla Firefox version 27, but I got crash after crash on relative simple pages as this one. Are you picking up signals that there is something wrong?

Martin, Thank you for your answer. I have gone back a release to Mozilla Firefox version 26, just like Juno, this because literately every few minutes and sometimes even sooner a crash, became to much for me. Hopefully anybody will found the answer soon because I like the securer 27 feature TLS 1.2 :-)

I also got crash after crash from upgrading to Firefox 27.0 and Flash 12.0.0.44 at the same time. With this combo, I cannot even launch the Firefox profile manager to try a new fresh profile. Rather than downgrading Firefox like Paulus, I downgraded Flash back to 12.0.0.43 and it is fine now.

It was a Tab Mix Plus bug that has been fixed in the most recent official release.

@Zsolt: Thanks for the tip regarding keyconfig. I installed it and there were in fact no conflicts for control+shift+T (Undo Close Tab). I don't know if there were any mouse conflicts. (Is there a "mouseconfig" extension somewhere?) In Tab Mix Plus, I had assigned double-click-on-tab and double-click-on-tab-bar to Undo Close Tab and I almost always use those actions to reopen closed tabs. (I sometimes reopen them using right-click-on-tab > Undo Close Tab or > Closed Tabs List.) I never use control+shift+T. Regardless, double-clicking a tab or the tab bar, and the tab context menu's Undo Close Tab command both worked prior to Firefox 27; stopped working after I updated to Firefox 27; and then started working again after I updated to Tab Mix Plus 0.4.1.3. Although I couldn't find Undo Close Tab explicitly mentioned in Tax Mix Plus's change log -- it was apparently part of a more general fix -- I'm satisfied that Tab Mix Plus was the culprit.

Again, thanks very much for turning me on to keyconfig! I have already put it to good use: Using control+k to focus on the Search Bar in the main Browser window is a deeply ingrained habit by now. Switch to the Library window, and it doesn't work -- control+f and control+f do -- but I still instinctively do control+k *every time* I want to search the Library. Using keyconfig, I changed control+f to control+k in the Library. Problem solved!

Additional remarks: I never had the Undo Close Tab problem in Pale Moon x64. I don't know if this is because Pale Moon 24.3.x hadn't been updated to incorporate the relevant Firefox code or because I use the development (pre-release, beta) build of Tab Mix Plus in Pale Moon. I don't think I've ever run into a new beta-specific bug with Tab Mix Plus pre-release builds, so I've switched to the pre-release channel in Firefox as well. (It will probably save me a few days of hassle from time to time, and if I run into beta-related problems at some point, I can always switch back to the official release channel.)

Find is working for me. As for Flash Player, I just updated to the latest version (same as Jim's, above) and the plug-in worked fine on some sites but "stopped working" when I tried loading a video from a different site. (Maybe that site used a different Web player?) All of my plug-ins are set to click-to-play, and this on Windows 7.

There seem to be two new features in the stable version of Firefox 27, which were not in the stable version of FF 26. Well, they are new in the Linux stable version in any event. I cannot speak for Windows and Mac users. These were reported here in the Nightly versions a few months ago. They are set at 'false' at the moment by default.

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Ghacks is a technology news blog that was founded in 2005 by Martin Brinkmann. It has since then become one of the most popular tech news sites on the Internet with five authors and regular contributions from freelance writers.